Friday, March 29, 2019

How big data can help save the world

Sara Del Valle, LANL photo.

As a data scientist for Los Alamos National Laboratory, I study data from wide-ranging, public sources to identify patterns in hopes of being able to predict trends that could be a threat to global security. Multiple data streams are critical because the ground-truth data (such as surveys) that we collect is often delayed, biased, sparse, incorrect or, sometimes, nonexistent.

For example, knowing mosquito incidence in communities would help us predict the risk of mosquito-transmitted disease such as dengue, the leading cause of illness and death in the tropics. However, mosquito data at a global (and even national) scale are not available. (Full story)

New system to check for dangerous natural gas leaks

Manvendra Dubey with the gas detection

system mounted on a drone, LANL photo.

Ateam from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Aeris Technology and Rice University has developed the Autonomous, Low- cost, Fast Leak Detection System (ALFaLDS) to detect, locate and quantify leaks quickly, safely and inexpensively.

Three subsystems make up the overall system: a small methane and ethane sensor, an anemometer that measures wind, and a trained neural network (which some would call artificial intelligence) that ingests and analyzes all the data to find leaks rapidly – almost in real time. (Full story)

“Ice V11” — Strange form of water found in otherworldly alien environments

“Any icy satellite or planetary interior is intimately connected to the object’s surface,” said Arianna Gleason-Holbrook, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a visiting scientist in Stanford University’s Extreme Environments Laboratory. “Learning about these icy interiors will help us understand how the worlds in our solar system formed and how at least one of them, so far as we know, came to have all the necessary characteristics for life.”

“These experiments with water are the first of their kind, allowing us to witness a fundamental disorder-to-order transition in one of the most abundant molecules in the universe,” said Gleason, a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full story)

More trees dying in New Mexico

Forest mortality increased nearly 50 percent across New Mexico in 2018, the first jump in five years, according to an annual report on the health of the state’s forests.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have said it is highly likely New Mexico will lose the vast majority of its forests by 2050.

The U.S. Forest Service said in a report issued in 2013 that the Santa Fe and Carson national forests were at risk of losing a combined total of nearly 900,000 acres of trees by 2027. (Full story)

Friday, March 22, 2019

Scientists on the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have discovered a new way in which matter and antimatter behave differently.

“This gives us a sort of family lineage for our ­particle of interest,” says Cesar da Silva, a scientist from Los Alamos National Lab and also a LHCb collaborator. “Once stable particles are measured by the detector, we can trace their ancestors to find the primordial generation of particles in the collision.

“Because of quantum mechanics, we cannot predict what each single unstable particle will decay into, but we can figure out the probabilities for each possible outcome.” (Full Story)

Lighting the way to removing radioactive elements

Actinides on the periodic table, LANL image.

The waste treatment plan calls for vitrification, a high-heat process that traps radioactive elements in solid "logs." Easily removing americium, which generates unwanted heat, and storing it separately from the logs or reusing it could simplify waste treatment. Hanson and his colleagues' research relies on a stringy molecule that bonds to all the elements in the beaker. Light excites just the americium and causes the strings to permanently change. It makes the troublemaker stand out and easier to separate from uranium, plutonium, and all the other heavy elements at the bottom of the Periodic Table. "They are in an exotic area of the Periodic Table," said Stosh Kozimor, a CAST scientist at DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

A new distributed file system for high-performance computing distributed March 14 via the software collaboration site GitHub provides unprecedented performance for creating, updating and managing extreme numbers of files.

“We designed DeltaFS to enable the creation of trillions of files,” said Brad Settlemyer, a Los Alamos computer scientist and project leader. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University jointly developed Delta FS. “Such a tool aids researchers in solving classical problems in high-performance computing, such as particle trajectory tracking or vortex detection.” (Full Story)

Muon tomography and its ability to probe the unseeable

In 1968, American physicist Luis Walter Alvarez set up a detector in a cavity near the center of the base of the Pyramid of Chephren in Giza, Egypt. Alvarez used “muons,” laying the groundwork for decades of research using muon technology.

More than 7,000 miles away from the Great Pyramids, nestled in four mesas at the Pajarito Plateau in New Mexico, is Los Alamos National Laboratory, a hub for muon tomography research. It was here that physicist Christopher Morris and his team in 2003 invented a new technique for muon tomography known as “muon scattering” tomography. (Full Story)

Northern New Mexico College President Rick Bailey and Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thomas Mason say a new partnership between their institutions can become a model for how higher education and industry can join forces to train the state’s workforce.

Under a five-year agreement, the college will provide a full-time instructor and associate degrees in radiation protection, while LANL will write the program’s curriculum and offer students on-site internships alongside its radiological control technicians. (Full Story)

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Friday, March 15, 2019

Promise of technology

Theoretical biologist Bette Korber, Journal photo.

Bette Korber had to fight intense pushback when she first proposed her idea for an HIV vaccine designed on a computer. The theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was trying to garner support for her “mosaic” vaccine design. Her idea was that with access to hundreds of thousands of different HIV sequences from around the world, a computational code could design synthetic proteins to fight the virus.

Her method “evolves” sequences to solve a particular problem – with a small set of proteins, can science develop the best possible immunological coverage for the global diversity of HIV? In other words, can a vaccine be created that targets HIV generally, despite its massive number of variations? (Full story)

Healthy forests depend on balancing fire and water

Los Alamos scientists used data collected before and after the 2011 Las Conchas fire, LANL photo.

To unravel exactly how fire influences moisture in burned soil, hydrologists and other environmental scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a sophisticated computer model.

The initial experiment using the Los Alamos model indicated that that soil moisture generally increases following fire with the exception of high-severity-burn areas that experience greater surface runoff — the soil is much drier after a really intense wildfire. If heavy or frequent rainstorms follow a fire, the chance of flooding increases, but the soil winds up drier than it was before the fire, despite all that flowing water. (Full story)

New reactor-liner alloy material offers strength, resilience

Interior of a magnetic confinement reactor, from ITER.

Anew tungsten-based alloy developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory can withstand unprecedented amounts of radiation without damage. Essential for extreme irradiation environments such as the interiors of magnetic fusion reactors, previously explored materials have thus far been hobbled by weakness against fracture, but this new alloy seems to defeat that problem.

"This material showed outstanding radiation resistance when compared to pure nanocrystalline tungsten materials and other conventional alloys," said Osman El Atwani, the lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the "Radiation Effects and Plasma Material Interactions in Tungsten Based Materials" project at Los Alamos. (Full story)

“We designed DeltaFS to enable the creation of trillions of files,” said Brad Settlemyer, a Los Alamos computer scientist and project leader. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University jointly developed Delta FS. “Such a tool aids researchers in solving classical problems in high-performance computing, such as particle trajectory tracking or vortex detection.” (Full story)

Mercury is every planet’s closest neighbor

You probably learned in school — or space camp — that Venus is Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. Ready to get your mind blown? A new model of the planets’ orbit shuffles things around, calculating that Earth’s closest neighbor, on average, is actually Mercury.

Sure, Venus comes closer to Earth than Mercury, but it also spends a lot of time on the opposite side of the sun. Scientists from NASA, Los Alamos National Lab, and the U.S. Army put together a new model published Tuesday in Physics Today that breaks down the average distance among planets — and it turns out that they’re all, on average, closest to Mercury. (Full story)

Research predicts size, magnitude, timing of lab earthquakes

Earthquake simulation apparatus at Penn State, PSU photo.

For the first time, the magnitude, time and duration of earthquakes in a laboratory setting were predicted by a team of researchers from Penn State and Los Alamos National Laboratory. This research improves our understanding of earthquakes and could eventually lead to prediction measures in real-life scenarios, according to the researchers who published their results in a recent issue of Nature Geosciences.

Claudia Hulbert, Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, Paul Johnson and Christopher Ren, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Jacques Rivière and David Bolton, of Penn State, contributed to this research. (Full story)

Quantum dots offer stable light

Quantum dots in solution, LANL photo.

Ateam of researchers from Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory found that dots capable of stable light emission can be achieved by intentionally squashing colloidal quantum dots during chemical synthesis. Moreover, the squashed dots are fully comparable with the light produced by dots made with more complex processes and emit spectrally narrow light with a highly stable intensity and a non-fluctuating emission energy.

The team suggests that the strained colloidal quantum dots are a practical alternative to presently employed nano-scale light sources and can be used as single-particle, nano-scale light sources for optical quantum circuits, ultrasensitive sensors, and medical diagnostics. (Full story)

Friday, March 8, 2019

Quantum physics could protect the grid from hackers—maybe

Photo from Wired.

Cybersecurity experts have sounded the alarm for years: Hackers are ogling the U.S. power grid. The threat isn’t merely hypothetical—a group affiliated with the Russian government gained remote access to energy companies’ computers, the Department of Homeland Security published last March.

One challenge is simply the reality of working on the grid itself. “You can’t just shut the power off,” says physicist Tom Venhaus of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who collaborated on the project. “It’s like working on a car with its engine running.” (Full Story)

Chemists explore the periodic table’s actinide frontier

Curium(III) ions (shown in tube) could help to decontaminate people exposed this radioactive actinide. From C&EN.

Stosh A. Kozimor at Los Alamos National Laboratory says that one of the field’s most important research themes is the use of actinide radiopharmaceuticals to treat cancer and other diseases. Known as targeted α therapy, it involves coupling an actinide to a targeting agent—such as an antibody or a protein—that locks onto specific cells in the body and kills them with the α particles emitted by the isotopes. α Particles consist of two neutrons and two protons bound together.

Actinium-225 is particularly well suited to the job. Its α particles travel for only 100 µm or less in the body, minimizing off-target effects. (Full Story)

Space nuclear power — seriously

Engineers install hardware on the Kilopower assembly at the Nevada National Security Site. NNSS photo.

NASA and its partners — the DOE, NNSA, the Los Alamos National Lab, the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Nevada National Security Site — ran a 2018 test called KRUSTY, for Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology. KRUSTY aimed to show the Kilopower system could generate fission electricity and remain stable and safe under space-relevant environmental conditions.

At the Nevada test site, the Kilopower reactor generated a controlled chain reaction, generating from 1 to 10 kW of thermal power while exposed to realistic operating temperatures in a vacuum. (Full Story)

When it comes to materials, one very important characteristic to look for is the strength. The stronger the material is, the more applications it can be used in (keeping in mind other characteristics).

Just recently, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a new tungsten-based alloy that has high strength. This alloy has showed its ability to withstand radiation without being damaged. This is important to be used in areas and environments where radiation exists such as magnetic fusion reactors; where it gets too dangerous for humans to react. These locations force a vast loss in materials which needs a high cost for constant replacement. (Full Story)

D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory has upgraded their D-Wave quantum computer to the D-Wave 2000Q system. Los Alamos is investing in D-Wave quantum technology to expand its foundational quantum computing research, enabling exploration of new and diverse quantum computing applications.

To date, Los Alamos and its research collaborators have built over 60 early quantum applications and conducted essential research in domains ranging from quantum mechanics, linear algebra, computer science, and machine learning, to earth science, biochemistry, sociology, and more. (Full Story)

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Friday, March 1, 2019

AI's big challenge

Garrett Kenyon, LANL photo.

Here’s the challenge with most deep learning neural networks, which reflect the prevailing approach to AI: calling them both deep and intelligent assumes they achieve ever more abstract and meaningful representations of the data at deeper and deeper levels of the network. It further assumes that at some point they transcend rote memorization to achieve actual cognition, or intelligence. But they do not.

This article's author is Garrett Kenyon, a physicist and neuroscientist specializing in neurally inspired computing in the Information Sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studies the brain and models of neural networks on the laboratory's high-performance computers. (Full story)

Split-sex animals are unusual, yes, but not as rare as you’d think

Top left, a male blue morpho butterfly; top middle, a female.

The rest have both male and female characteristics. From the NYT.

It is not clear what mechanisms the body has to ensure that most men get only one Y and most women get two X chromosomes, said Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist and principal investigator at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In typical females, one X is usually — but not always — turned off, she said, and some research suggests that there is a mechanism that counts how many X chromosomes are present and generally turns off all but one of them.

The interplay between genetics and hormones is complicated, she said. “Genetics produce hormones, but then the hormones can reprogram DNA,” she said, which might explain why there is a mismatch in some people between their sex chromosomes and their sex hormones. (Full story)

Harnessing top algae strains for bioenergy through collaboration

Algae bioreactors, LANL photo.

Wanted: Algae industry partners and academic researchers to help find the best algae strains for biofuels and bioproducts to reduce the cost of producing bioenergy from algae feedstocks.

Along with PNNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories comprise the DOE lab consortium sponsored by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. (Full story)

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